Letting go of insecure attachment...
will change your mindset and this is what you need to live a better life.
According to research, our attachment style pre-determines our future relationships style. And for life. What I before used to think, "well, it's the way I am..." now becomes: "this is the mindset I learned while surviving my childhood." If you have the courage to look back and understand the kind of mindset you have as a product of the attachment your parents gave you, then you can be on your path to changes.
If you happened to develop a fearful attachment, product of an attachment in which you were never secure of your caregiver's response to you, then this is what can happen. Suppose that you had some need for comfort, and your mother would be there one time, absent the other, present but distracted the third...You learned that being too distant from her left you alone, but being too near left you confused of her affection. You need to go toward others to get your needs met, but if you get close to others, they will hurt you, and this is your life's dilemma. You feel that your partner is the only person who can understand you...and at the same time you feel frightened of being close to him, because frustration will be the response. This conflicting expectation makes for rocky relationships....where you oscillate between feeling abandoned and feeling trapped in a relationship.
You may have learned to cling to your partner exactly when he rejects you, then feel trapped when your partner focuses exclusively on you...This wide distance between the two feelings make more difficult for you to perceive when you are being abused. If you need to cling to him exactly when he drifts apart from you, he will see you as dependent, unable to live by yourself and an easy target for his contempt.
Are you still with me? And, are you having that rare moment, when you say: This post is talking to me, because this is exactly what I do!
If you got to this insight moment, congratulations! is a real moment of achievement when you discover your attachment style and the consequences of it in your daily relationships....
Now, we are going to do a simple exercise:
The purpose is to separate your mindset from your present relationship:
You need to tell yourself:
I have a way of looking at the world that makes me unable to get the right distance from others. If I continue thinking that I don't deserve constant company and attention from a lover, I will continue getting partners who either abandon or suffocate me...
Each time I tell myself that people are weak, not caring enough and they will inevitably abandon me, I'm trying to recover the past relationship with my mother...I end up recreating what I knew then and there, with her...I don't have to do this to myself anymore; I can learn other ways of being with people with love and respect. Every time I feel abandoned, I will look at the present situation and see if I'm really abandoned, or is it my mental model who makes me perceive it? If it not real, and people continue being with me, do I get toxic ways of rejecting me so they can abandon me, as predicted? What am I doing to promote abandonment, so I can be right?
If you can work on this lesson, you will see that the key for changing and letting go of those insecure relationships is changing the way you look at the world. If you can drop the insecure mindset, and educate yourself that you deserve constant and loving support from a partner, you will be in your way of having more secure relationships.
Waiting for your comments, as usual! thanks for reading me...
PS. Do you want to read more? In their research, Dr. Phillip Shaver and Dr. Cindy Hazan found that about 60 percent of people have a secure attachment, while about 20 percent have an avoidant attachment, and 15 percent have an anxious/ambivalent attachment. So what does this mean? There are questions you can ask yourself to help determine your style of attachment and how it is affecting your relationships.So, keep reading...
“Insecure attachment” is what my imago therapist and I focused on…of course it can take time for all of this to percolate I found….afterall we have lived this way for most of our lives….to learn a new way requires the desire for something to be different in your life…to not being a victim to the idea that “well this is who I am”…..as humans we are jumble of contradictions…..when we tell another “well I am different than you” it’s putting up a wall and behind that wall one gets to be the victim….certainly there can still be the tendency to go to that “over-reaction” with another person. For myself when I don’t feel easy with life I will take myself to the question of “where am I feeling abandoned or rejected”…..knowing this has nothing to do with the person standing in front of me……and also making the connection to the loss of initiative and autonomy in my early life which resulted from rejection/abandonment issues….the fear if you take too much initiative/autonomy that you will be abandoned/rejected yet again……so the way back is to embrace those missing qualities I discovered….every day even if you need to write them on a piece of paper to carry with you….embrace your “self-reliance” and “wholeness” more and more. The more you embrace all of that the more I discovered you will live your life from “integrity”.